Accountability, or answerability, is necessary to prevent abuse and corruption. This requires both the provision of information and justification for actions. What was done and why?
Professional guidelines and standards of care, ethical codes of conduct and the law are all objective benchmarks that can be used to assess the actions and decisions of others. In any free society this necessitates the existence of organizations of truly independent opinion capable of standing in this judgment.
State PHPs are Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) over which the state health department has no supervisory oversight. There is no regulation, no transparency and no accountability. There is no public scrutiny and they police themselves.
In Ethical and Managerial Considerations Regarding State Physician Health Programs Drs. John Knight and J. Wesley Boyd call for greater oversight and scrutiny of PHPs by the medical community at large. They recommended periodic auditing, national standards and regulation. They also attempted to convince the Massachusetts Medical Society to implement changes at PHS where they served as Associate Directors with over two decades of collective experience.
These efforts to promote transparency and accountability at both local and national levels, however, fell on deaf ears.
State PHPs have systematically removed those not conforming to groupthink. Threatening them with litigation if they breached “peer-review” statutes and confidentiality agreements has effectively silenced them from reporting any misconduct, abuse or even crimes they may have witnessed.
In Massachusetts John Knight was removed in 2009 and J. Wesley Boyd in 2010. In Ethical and Managerial Considerations Regarding State Physician Health Programs they comment “if a PHP highlights a physician as particularly problematic, the evaluation center might–whether consciously or otherwise—tailor its diagnosis and recommendations in a way that will support the PHP’s impression of that physician.” So too will the clinical laboratories.
How is this any different from the case of Dr. Farid Fata, the Michigan oncologist who intentionally diagnosed healthy patients with cancer so he could charge them for unneeded chemotherapy? The U.S. Attorney called it the “most egregious” case of health care fraud ever. His acts may have contributed to one patient death. The institutional injustice of the PHP system is causing countless deaths of physicians.
To consciously “tailor” a diagnosis is fraud. To tailor a diagnosis of substance use disorder or any other psychiatric diagnosis is the political abuse of psychiatry. Misrepresentation, dishonesty, deception, and distortion play no role in the Profession and Guild of Medicine. To do so violates the basic moral principles of Medical Ethics–Autonomy, Beneficence, Non-Maleficence and Justice.
The “PHP-approved” assessment and treatment centers are all staffed by doctors of “like-mind.” It is a rigged game.
An audit of the North Carolina PHP found essentially no oversight from the Medical Board or Medical Society. The audit found that “abuse could occur without being detected,” and this is by design. By removing and blocking the provision of information necessary for accountability, restricting the liberties and freedoms of physicians, and increasing their power and control they have erected a framework of hidden abuse.
The situation in North Carolina is standard operating procedure for PHPs under the Federation of State Physician Health Programs (FSPHP). It is not the exception but the rule.
While outspoken in denouncing what they regard as unethical and unprofessional behavior by other doctors, they are resistant to apply even the most minimal standards to their own activities.
To whom are the PHPs accountable? Whom do they represent? These are legitimate concerns.
PHYSICIAN OR PROFESSIONAL HEALTH PROGRAM SURVEY
Please click on the link below and complete the following survey if you have been monitored or are being monitored by a PHP.
Professional Health Program (PHP) Survey
This is a confidential survey. If you have concerns about anonymity please create an alternative alias email address (this video shows you how to create an alias G-mail address), then use the alias email address as your “name” for future correlation.
Disrupted Physician 
I would love to send this to some boards. 🙂
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Please do!
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It aint like my name isn’t a word used in vain … why not? The decent doctors don’t deserve this reputation.
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Thanks Vic. Use anything you like from my blog. My primary interest is exposing this group that has arisen to power in the regulatory dark matter. Incidentally I have a straightforward policy- if anyone can validly and directly contradict any of my specific points or criticisms I will not only correct it but remove my entire blog. One-“Ike minded doc” attempted but was blatantly in error and I’m doing an upcoming post about it.
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Reblogged this on Disrupted Physician and commented:
If you have been monitored by a professional health program (PHP) and not yet completed the survey please do so now as your input is critically important in identifying and examining patterns. Your voice matters. Stand up and be counted.
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[…] Source: Physician Health Programs: The Need for Transparency and Accountability […]
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I keep posting, but no one reads, reports or even challenges my accusations or posts which appear to get scrubbed. My Google reviews are shadowbanned. I get no responses from the NC Medical Board (NCMB) or their deputized rogue hitman agency, the NC Physician Health Program (NCPHP)- I was just harassed with evaluation after evaluation. As I mentioned in my memoirs, “My Medical Legal Back Pages,” Publisher Archway, The NCMB along with NCPHP in 2002-3 were launching their new crusade against the “disruptive” physician. They needed a poster child. Just for chewing out a registration worker at Albemarle Hospital in Elizabeth City who was willfully derelict in her job but was supported by a hospital administrator, Sharon Tanner, who was trying to establish a network of employed physicians and wanted me and independent gone, as did a soon to be retiring competitor James Watson, MD and his crony Edward Eadie, MD who were instrumental in exploiting the NCPHP and NC Medical Board ( my 7 day suspension for a first time offense did not even qualify for the required ten day threshold for being a reportable offense to the NC MB) and who herself was escorted out of the hospital under police guard when she had financially run the hospital into the ground ( Elizabeth City no longer has any home based operative orthopedic surgeons after over a dozen have come and left) they sent me to 4 evaluations by their own experts two of which were by the same NCPHP Director Michael Wilkerson, MD including their own forensic psychologist John Castlebury, PhD, Psychiatrist Philip Hillsman MD, and Center for Professional Well Being by Drs Pifferling PhD and Louise Andrew MD, JD all who had cleared me from the start and had recommended no “therapy”- either behavioral or drug nor any further evaluations. Not satisfied, the NCMB and NCPHP finally sent me out of state to Talbot Recovery Center Atlanta where in an incredible conflict of interest, Talbot suddenly gave the NCMB what it had been shopping for and recommended a 3 month in-house therapy program of “anger management,” naturally which would cost me $50,000- except that Talbot suddenly recognized they didn’t have a formal program for this BS dx of “disruptive physician” and sent me to Pine Grove Recovery Center in Hattiesburg, MS. When I arrived there in MS, they too had no such program. They then declared me as a chemically impaired physician or alcoholic and required me to attend AA meetings, the 12 Step Program, pee in the cup, attend Caduceus and sit around drug addicted or alcoholic physicians all day long for three months while they accused me of the same.
THERE HAS NEVER BEEN ANY HINT OF, RUMOR OF, FINDING OF, BY EVEN THE NCMB’S OWN EXPERTS, A FAILED DRUG SCREEN, A DUI OR ANY ACCUSATION THAT DRUGS OR ALCOHOL HAD EVER BEEBN A PROBLEM, EVER IN MY ENTIRE LIFE! THIS WAS PURE FRAUD AND EXTORTION- BOTH MISDIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT. NOTHING ABOUT THIS SHAM BY THE NCMB OR NCPHP WAS EVER ADMITTED UPON MY RETURN OR REPORTED (The NCMB has sovereign immunity) WHERE IT WAS LEARNED THAT MY COMPETITOR/ REPLACEMENT JOHN KONA MD, RECRUITED BY SHAROIN TANNER HAD BEEN THE ALCOHOLIC ALL ALONG!!!!!! EVERYTHING IS HUSH -HUSH.
The NCMB and NCPHP, Tanner, Eadie, Watson went all-out to destroy what was left of my career and after what had happened before in KY I leave you to read in an even more incredible story of events in my memoirs., The NCMB and NCPHP are basically political organizations who will destroy a physician out of a politicial/public relations agenda.
It is in utter disbelief that my plight has been ignored, shadow banned, buried- even by my own colleagues even on these kinds of forums. You have the names, locations and my accusations. Check them out.
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Call me
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